Tracking URL Examples for Reddit, X, Email and More

A tracking URL, and one real example

A tracking url is just your normal link with a few labels added to the end. Nothing more. Here is a complete tracking url example you could paste into a Reddit post right now:

https://yoursaas.com/pricing?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch_week

That link sends the visitor to the exact same pricing page as the plain https://yoursaas.com/pricing. The labels after the question mark just tell your analytics that this particular click came from Reddit. If you want the meaning of each label, what a UTM parameter is covers it, and source vs medium covers which value goes where. This guide is the copy-paste sheet: real examples for every place you actually post.

What changes per place, and what does not

When you share one launch across several places, most of the tracking link stays identical. The destination is the same. The campaign is the same. Only one thing changes from place to place: the pair of utm_source and utm_medium.

utm_source is yours to invent, so name the place plainly: reddit, producthunt, x. utm_medium is the one you cannot make up, because Google reads it to sort the visit into a channel, and only a fixed set of values work. Get that pair right and every example below falls into place.

Copy-paste examples for every place you post

Here is the whole set. Same destination, same campaign, correct utm_source and utm_medium for each place. Swap yoursaas.com/pricing and launch_week for your own, and these are ready to use. If you would rather not edit URLs by hand, a tracking link builder assembles the same thing from a channel you pick.

Two things are worth noticing in that table. The social platforms share one medium, social, while Product Hunt, Hacker News and Indie Hackers share another, referral. That is not arbitrary. Google groups the first set as Organic Social and the second as Referral, based entirely on that medium value. And the paid ad row uses paid_social, not social, because a paid click and an organic post from the same platform belong in different buckets. Mislabel a paid ad as social and its spend gets credited to your organic posts.

Telling apart two posts in the same place

The table gives every platform its own source, but one launch often means several posts in the same platform. Post to r/SaaS and r/startups on the same day and both links carry utm_source=reddit and utm_medium=social. Identical. Your report shows "reddit, social" and cannot tell the two subreddits apart.

That is what utm_content is for. Add it to separate links that are otherwise the same:

https://yoursaas.com/pricing?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch_week&utm_content=r-saas

Use r-saas, r-startups, and so on. The r- prefix instead of the real r/saas avoids the slash, which would get percent-encoded into ugly %2F noise in your reports. utm_content is free text, so you can name these anything, as long as you stay consistent.

Why the examples you copy elsewhere break

Search for tracking url examples and you will find guides that confidently tell you to tag Reddit posts with utm_medium=community. Others suggest utm_medium=post, or utm_medium=dm for direct messages. They look reasonable. They are also broken.

None of those values match any of Google's channel rules. When a medium value matches nothing, the visit does not land in a sensible bucket. It lands in one called Unassigned, which Google defines plainly: "Unassigned is the value Analytics uses when there are no other channel rules that match the event data" (Google Analytics Help).

So the click happens, the visitor arrives, and the traffic simply goes missing from the channel report you actually read. There is no error and no warning. You notice weeks later, if at all, when a chunk of your launch traffic is sitting in a bucket labeled "we could not figure this out."

The safe list is short. For utm_medium, stick to social for organic social posts, referral for communities and link aggregators, email for anything sent by email, and paid_social (or a value containing cpc) for ads. Everything else is a gamble against a rulebook you cannot see. This is also why building a link in a utm builder beats copying one from a random guide: the builder fills the medium from the channel you pick, so it cannot hand you a value Google will quietly reject.

The honest limit

A correct tracking URL tells you which place and which channel a click came from. It still does not tell you which person clicked, or what they did once they landed. For a founder trying to turn a launch into the first few paying users, that second question is usually the one that decides what to do next.

FAQ

What does a correct tracking URL look like for each place I actually post?

It is your normal link with utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign added on the end. For a subreddit: ?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch_week. For your newsletter, swap to utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email. For Product Hunt, utm_source=producthunt&utm_medium=referral. The full copy-paste table above covers every common place, and you only change utm_source and utm_medium from one to the next.

What source and medium should I use for Reddit, X, Product Hunt, email, and paid ads?

Source is the place, named plainly: reddit, x, producthunt, newsletter. Medium is the channel type and must match Google's list: social for organic Reddit, X and LinkedIn posts, referral for Product Hunt, Hacker News and Indie Hackers, email for newsletters and cold email, and paid_social for Reddit or X ads. The pair is what Google reads to file the visit.

Why do some example URLs I copy from other guides break my reporting?

Because they use a utm_medium value Google does not recognise, most often utm_medium=community for Reddit. GA4 only sorts a visit into a channel when the medium matches one of its rules, so an invented value sends the traffic to Unassigned, where it disappears from your channel reports with no error. Stick to social, referral, email and paid_social and your examples will actually report.